In the U.S. Dramatic Competition film Didi, the feature debut of writer-director Sean Wang, a Taiwanese American boy learns to skate handle the emotions of adolescent longing in the summer before high school. Set in 2008, the film is replete with period signifiers familiar to any child of the era, including MySpace friend rankings, AIM messaging, and Windows XP.

In her discussion of Didi below, editor Arielle Zakowski, whose most recent credit is the 2023 computer screen film Missing, explains the importance of test screenings and how she brought the film’s period setting to life and contrasted the excitement of the protagonist’s outdoor life with the quietude of his home.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Zakowski: I had been a fan of director Sean Wang’s work for years but never knew him personally, so when he reached out and told me about Dìdi I was instantly excited. We have a handful of mutual friends, including some of the team I had just worked with on my previous film, Missing, so we had both known of each other but had yet to work together. We met for coffee and the rest is history!

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Zakowski: Our edit schedule was pretty tight from the start, so we knew it was going to be a bit of a sprint. The script was so strong from the get-go and every department absolutely killed it during production, so I felt very lucky to be starting with material that was already working even in its roughest form. One of our biggest focuses throughout the edit was pacing—the movie follows 13-year-old Chris Wang (played with incredible nuance by Izaac Wang) as he navigates the ups and downs of coming-of-age during the summer before high school. We wanted his outside world (friends, crushes, skateboarding) to be buzzing with energy, contrasting with the frustratingly quiet, patient pace of life at home with his family. As a result, we spent a lot of time trying to build out that contrast in the edit—cutting certain sequences to their tightest iterations while letting others breathe and sit in silence.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Zakowski: I’m a huge believer in having test screenings to get feedback from friends and colleagues throughout the process. It’s inevitable that everyone working on the film loses a degree of objectivity, and having fresh eyes on each new version of the cut to help guide us as to what is and isn’t working, both emotionally and story-wise, is invaluable. We had a lot of screenings along the way, some with dozens of people and some with only three or four, to help keep us on track and point us to what we needed to focus on. Very grateful to all those that watched rough cuts and sat through hours of discussion sharing their thoughts!

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Zakowski: Once I discovered my love of film, I figured out pretty quickly that editing was my favorite way to help bring a film to life. I started as an assistant editor in the commercial world, eventually working my way up to editor. Once I made that jump, I was able to transition into long-form editing through documentaries and eventually made the jump to features. I’ve been very fortunate to work with some incredibly talented filmmakers over the years—editors Angus Wall and Stewart Reeves were early inspirations who I was lucky enough to assist and learn from. A lot of the way that I approach editing stems from what I learned watching those two tackle edits. Every time I get to work on a new project I feel like I learn something new about editing and storytelling.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Zakowski: I am an Adobe Premiere gal through and through! I tend to move around the project fairly quickly and find Premiere to be both very intuitive and very fast. We used Premiere Productions on this movie so that my genius assistant editor Chris Tennant and I could both be in the project at the same time and shuttle things back and forth to each other instantly.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Zakowski: I wouldn’t say most difficult necessarily, but there’s a scene in the movie where a large group of boys are fighting in a park. Figuring out this scene was a process of discovery—at the beginning there were many lines of dialogue and a mini-narrative playing out between the characters, and we learned through trial-and-error that the best version of this scene within the context of the greater film was to strip it almost entirely of story and let it play out as a chaotic mosh pit of teenage testosterone.

Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?

Zakowski: In addition to the typical VFX shots (including a couple of fun sequences that may or may not involve talking animals), the movie has a handful of scenes that take place on computer screens. We actually created all of these scenes ourselves thanks to our small-but-mighty post team—building out Illustrator assets of every 2008-era computer app and animating them in After Effects to bring them to life. We tried to fill these with as much Windows XP nostalgia as we could!

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Zakowski: From the moment I read the script I knew this film was special, and everything from the magic of the footage to the astounding creativity and collaboration of the filmmaking team has echoed that. I hope the humor and the heart of this story resonate with audiences as much as it did for me, and I’m excited to see where it goes!